hen Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales he
showed all England converging not upon Parliament and King at
Westminster, but upon Archbishop Thomas Becket’s shrine in
Canterbury’s cathedral, the part of England closest to
Jerusalem. In April, in Spring, the vita nuova,

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge
strondes, To ferne alwes, kowthe in sondry
londes; And specially from every shires
ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they
wende, The hooly blisful martir for to
seke That hem
hath holpen whan that they were seeke.1

Their allegiance is to heaven, rather than to the
world. The world’s hierarchies are put aside, and all become one,
fallen Adam in imitation of Christ, reflected in the holy martyrs
in His image. The pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas Becket was like
the 'healing of the nations' of Ezechiel (47.12) and the
Apocalypse (22.1-2). Both Chaucer and Dante write of this
universality among pilgrims, this democracy, this Republic whose
Christ is King, ‘Ma noi siam peregrin, come voi siete’ in Dante’s
Purgatorio (II.63), ‘And pilgrimes were they alle’ in
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (I.26).2

3Thomas Becket, for
confronting King Henry II’s quest for power, with that of the
Church, was murdered, martyred, in his Cathedral at Christmas,
1170. It was the century following the Norman Conquest of
England, the English language being suppressed, the Anglo-Saxons
who had enslaved the Celtic population, themselves now becoming
serfs. It is interesting that Thomas Becket was Norman, while
Edward Grim, the cleric who carried the cross, with which he
tried to save the Archbishop's life, having his arm hacked off
by the swords of the Norman knights, was Anglo-Saxon.

Immediately miracles were reported, and carefully
recorded by his monks, of persons being healed when drinking of
the mingled water and blood, or being healed when in the
presence of the tomb, or receiving visions there when incubating
at the shrine, or even while at home. Canterbury’s monks
circulated abstracts of the miracles to numerous religious
houses in England and France.4Guernes de
Pont-Sainte-Maxence arrived to narrate the event of Becket's
martyrdom in Norman French from the altar to assembled
pilgrims, being paid for his labours by Becket’s sister, a
nun at Barking Abbey, where Chaucer’s daughter was later
also to be a nun.5

The majority of the miracles initially happened
to those who only spoke Anglo-Saxon, often women and children,
and who were barely understood by the Anglo-Norman monks of the
nation and language that had now conquered them.6In a sense what was taking place was a
theatre of liberation against the unjust uses of power, as
with the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero at Mass in a San
Salvador hospital, 24 March, 1980, as with the act of the
Pope, in Lent, in the 2000 Jubilee, taking upon himself the
sins of the Church at the opening of the Holy Door; these
events reflecting the Gospel of Christ's Passion in
Jerusalem. Only with such actions, such passions, by the
repentence of those who committed them or by martydom can
the injustice be alleviated, and there be healing of the
nations and of faith.

If we listen carefully to these voices of long
ago, speaking Latin, Anglo-Norman, English, Celtic, we may come
to understand and ease modern tensions between Islam and
Judaeo-Christianity, between Palestinian and Israeli, between
those suicidally lacking power and those belligerantly having
it. For the Canterbury pilgrimage was also part of a much larger
pattern, the microcosm of its macrocosm.

Medieval Christendom speaks of four major
pilgrimages, to Jerusalem, to Rome, to Compostela, to
Canterbury, among countless others, including those to St Patrick’s
Purgatory in Ireland, which would influence Dante’s Commedia.
Initially, in Christendom, there was not the need to journey to
a specific shrine, but instead of expiating crimes by exile.
Such pilgrim exiles, even if they were murderers, by canon law,
were garbed distinctively, were to be housed and given bread and
water for twenty-four hours, and were to be treated as if they
were Christ in disguise. Our modern hospitals began in response
to the need to nurse sick and dying pilgrims as a Christian act
of mercy.

Journeying to Jerusalem and Rome as sacred places
of Christ and his saints made sense and such pilgrimages were
frequently performed even by women such as Helena of York, Egeria of Spain, Guthrithyr
of Iceland, Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe. But why
also Compostela and Canterbury? Islam had overrun Spain and
Saracens had journeyed on haj to Cordova, as today they
do to Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The Beatus Apocalypse,
the Song of Roland, and the Compostela pilgrimage were
all part of the Reconquista of Spain, countering Islam with
Christendom, largely by imitating Islam’s haj and jihad
with pilgrimages and crusades. At the same time Canterbury
signified the Church countering the State, being as England’s
Jerusalem. The two pilgriamges to Compostela and Canterbury,
like the others, were figures of liberation. In particular at
Canterbury this was reinforced by King Henry II’s penance made
at the tomb of Thomas Becket.

A further Jerusalem substitute or rather
palimpsest of a Jerusalem upon a European city was Canterbury in
England. St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in
his own cathedral in 1170, quickly became as if England's
Christ, Canterbury as if England's Jerusalem. The iconography of
Thomas' Christ-mirroring martyrdom is to be found throughout
Europe. One one side, usually, is the clerk Grim, Thomas'
crucifer, whose arm was struck by the sword blows as he defended
his archbishop (John of Salisbury, however, sought safety in
flight); on the other side are three, sometimes four, knights
who wield their heavy swords, the armorial bearings clearly
shown on their shields, in the center St Thomas is on his knees,
raising his hands to God in prayer. For this crime none of the
knights was apprehended, though their king, Henry II, walked
barefoot to Canterbury as a penitent pilgrim and was scourged
while naked by the monks at its altar, 12 July 1174.* Other
kings from other lands also journeyed barefoot on pilgrimage to
the archbishop's tomb.7 Henry
VIII, however, walked barefoot not to Canterbury but to
Walsingham.8

London was the city of Thomas' birth, Canterbury
the site of the martyrdom, the one as if his Bethlehem, the
other as if his Jerusalem.9 The
journey between the two cities thus imitated the Saint's vita et
passio. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales' pilgrimage from a London inn
to Canterbury's cathedral reflects this. The archbishop in
turning from worldly pomp and secular power as the king's
favourite and becoming the man of God, servant of the Church and
sainted martyr, provided a "bri3t mirrour", a speculum, as
Langland put it, to all bishops (B.XV.435-443, 552-555). The
medieval world saw bishops as types of Aaron.10 Thomas' martyrdom shaped Canterbury
as England's Jerusalem, upon which pilgrims, especially in
Jubilee years, converged; his birth in London made him the
patron saint of that city.

Pilgrims journeying to Canterbury, like Chaucer's
Monk, showed their intent not with Jerusalem crosses, nor with
Roman keys, but with jangling Canterbury bells. At the martyrdom
of Thomas with swords blows to his skull and brain, the monks
had sponged up the blood, and, finding miracles were wrought by
it, diluted it in a well. Pilgrim ampulles filled with this
diluted blood and well water and stamped with Becket’s image
with mitre and crozier and the legend, ‘OPTIMUS
EGRORUM MEDICUS FIT TOMA BONORUM’, were
acquired by pilgrims and were the subject of many miracle
narrations. Chaucer speaks of foreign and native pilgrims
seeking ‘The hooly blisful martir . . . That hem hath holpen
whan that they were seeke’. In gratitude for their healing the
pilgrims brought offerings to the tomb. The ampulles with St
Thomas' well water and badges with St Thomas' head or figure on
them were the signs of the completed pilgrimage.11They were Canterbury's answer to
Jerusalem's palms, Rome's vernicles and Compostela's shells.
The monks, in return, received rich offerings from pilgrims.

The tomb of the Saint, like Jerusalem's Ark, was
adorned with gold, silver and precious gems that glinted in the
light of offering candles. Pilgrims slept overnight in its
presence seeking visions and miracles of healing in a practice
derived from the pagan world known as incubation which was
widely believed in by illiterate people. In time the Lollards
were to attack Canterbury's shrine and the piglrimage to it as
so much Golden Calf idolatry. Henry VIII was to obliterate the
shrine and references to Thomas, including those in Piers
Plowman, but not the Canterbury Tales.12

There is yet another parallel between
Canterbury's cathedral and Jerusalem's Temple. The pilgriamge to
Thoams Becket's tomb became less popular than those to other
English shrines and so was artificially encouraged by
Canterbury's Jubilee of 1220, fifty years after the murder in
the Cathedral, and f 1270. The Pope granted Jubilee indulgences
to Canterbury in return for a handsome payment to his treasury
in the years 1320, 1370 and every fifty years thereafter until
1520. The Canterbury 1220 and 1270 Jubilees set the precedent
for Rome's initial one of 1300.13 Thus
Chaucer's Canterbury taught Dante's Rome a trick or two. Dante
set his pilgrimage poem in the Roman Jubilee year of 1300. The
practice originated, however, not in Rome, but first in
Jerusalem in celebration of the Exodus, and then at Canterbury
in celebration of St Thomas. Chaucer, reader of Dante that he
was, may well have contemplated setting his Tales in 1370 when
all converged upon holy Canterbury seeking the Jubilee
indulgence. Chaucer had been in England that Eastertide, then
had left for the Continent on the king's business in June.14 Kent and its capital, Canterbury,
lay on the busy road from London to Dover, the route he would
most likely have taken.

II. The Miracles

André Vauchez has observed that the study of
canonization proceedings reveals much concerning the social
realities of the time.15 In my
research on medieval women contemplatives I have found his
observation to be true, and that here art is as a theocracy, of
the Kingdom of Heaven, including the humble, becoming a mirror
in which all can find their image. Consider St Umiltà da Faenza,
whose miracles are shown, painted by Pietro Lorenzetti, while
Orcagna sculpts her (the polyptich and the sculpture were
originally placed at her tomb).16
Consider St Birgitta of Sweden, whose life is
carefully narrated, her writings published; miniatures,
sculptures and frescoes showing her and her miracles found all
over Europe. A document in our State Archive in Florence,
penned by a Brigittine monk at Vadstena, tells of women in
childbirth, paraluzed nuns in convents, sailors threatened
with shipwreck, whose prayers to St Birgitta are granted.17And consider, also, St Francesca of Rome, with the
two fresco cycles, in colour and in grisaille, in her
convent, showing episodes from her life, her miracles and
her visions.18These images, like those in
Canterbury's stained glass windows about St Thomas Becket's
tomb, are saints' legends for the poor, for the pilgrims, legenda
pauperum et peregrinorum.

Initially, Thomas’ body was laid to rest in the
crypt, the cathedral then having the architecture such as one
sees in Benedictine St Benoit sur Loire and at San Miniato. The
tomb had holes in its sides to allow pilgrims greater closeness
to the inner casket for their healing. Then, in 1174, fire
ravaged the Cathedral, necessitating much rebuilding.19In 1220, the saint’s body and tomb were
translated to the rebuilt and expanded east end, the Trinity
Chapel. Pilgrims walked around the golden bejewelled shrine,
framed by windows of the miracles of Becket. In 1376,
Richard II’s father, the Black Prince, died and was buried
beside Thomas Becket with full honours and the Royal
Standard.

A Venetian diplomat who saw Thomas’ tomb at the
beginning of the sixteenth century marvelled at the gold
covering it, in turn covered with gems, sapphires, diamonds,
emeralds and a vast ruby given by King Louis VII of France.20 When Henry VIII suppressed
Canterbury’s cathedral priory, the jewels and precious metals
from this tomb filled twenty-six carts.21
There remains only the tomb of the Black Prince, with its
symbols of State, of war.

III. Windows as Mirrors

Twelve stained glass windows, similarly sparkling
with the colours of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, celebrated
the miracles of the saint. Their narrations show scenes like
miniatures in a book illustrating saints' legends. In them we
can see the past as in a glass, but face to face.

Seven of these twelve thirteenth-century windows,
unlike the gold and gems of Becket's tomb, survive, to tell us
their stories of the miracles of healing of ‘The hooly blisful martir’, and these
carefully follow the accounts given by the shrine’s 'custos martyrii’, Benedict and William.

These are the bejewelled windows in Canterbury’s
Trinity Chapel of the saint’s miracles, of stories that range
from princes to peasants, that include Normans, Anglo-Saxons and
Britons, children, women and men, lay and cleric, and which are
truly windows into a past humanity:

Window I of the North Aisle of the Trinity Chapel
includes St Thomas blessing, the knights at the Cathedral door,
the penance of Henry II at the tomb, that we have already seen,
then a crippled child on the back of a man at the Tomb; Window
III includes Baldric injured in a fall from his horse, cured,
who comes to the Tomb, four pilgrims on horseback, four on foot
and one with crutches, William, a London priest who is
paralysed, is cured by a drop of the Martyr’s blood; Window IV
includes pilgrims with the healing St Thomas’ water; the Martyr
visiting a sick man; Petronilla, an epileptic nun of Polesworth,
in a fit before her abbess, then taken to the Tomb and healed,

King Louis VII of France disturbed by son’s
illness, visited by the Saint in a dream and told to visit the
Tomb;

a maniac, Henry of Fordwich, is brought by his
keepers to the Tomb. Cured, he kneels in gratitude the cords and
clubs of his keepers now laid aside;

Audrey of Canterbury in fever drinks St Thomas’
well water into which a Monk is mixing blood; Window V includes
St Thomas appearing in mass vestments from his shrine to a
sleeping monk, Godwin of Boxgrove in thanksgiving for healing
from leprosy gives his garments to the poor, the crippled
daughters of Godbold of Boxley are healed at the Tomb;

The South Aisle of the Trinity Chapel’s Window VI
includes the healing of Juliana of Rochester from blindness, the
labourer Richard Sunieve of Edgeworth becomes afflicted with
leprosy, he is cured at the Tomb and shows this to his master,
mistress, and mother, Rodbertulus of Rochester, a naughty child
stoning frogs, drowns in the Medway, his playmates who had been
throwing stones with him and his parents rescuing the child, who
recovers;

Matilda of Cologne, a maniac who murdered her
baby, is beaten by her keepers at the Tomb, where she recovers;

Sir Jordan Fitzeisulf’s household is afflicted by
plague, the first victim, the nurse, Britonis, is buried,

ten year old William next dying before his
parents’ eyes, pilgrims bring holy St Thomas water and he
recovers, but Sir Jordan fails to go to the tomb with an
offering and St Thomas comes to Gimp the leper in a vision
telling him to warn Sir Jordan to make the offering, meanwhile
more family members and servants fall ill,

finally, belatedly, they arrive at the shrine
with offerings of gold and silver coins;

The Fitzeisulf family was Anglo-Norman, their
nurse Britonis, obviously British, Celtic, Gimp the leper,
Anglo-Saxon. Through Saint Thomas, as in the Gospel, the
vanquished conquer, the humble can speak to the proud.

Window VII gives the story of Adam the Forester,
shot in the throat by poachers he is given St Thomas’ well water
and recovers, returning to the shrine with gifts;

Window IX gives pilgrims on the road to
Canterbury, one on horseback, the remainder on foot, one with a
crutch (the first image we saw), and grateful pilgrims making an
offering at the Tomb; Window XI includes John of Roxburgh thrown
into the Tweed when his horse stampedes and his rescue; Henry of
Beche, a small lame boy with stick, on pilgrimage with his
parents; Window XII includes the story of the child Geoffrey of
Winchester, first healed by St Thomas of fever, then discovered
safe and sound in his cradle when a wall collapses on it; the
lame child Edwin of Berkhamstead, on crutches, with his mother
offers money at the tomb; the leprous priest, Elias of Reading,
with two doctors examining him and discussing his case,

William
of Gloucester, a workman building a bishop’s palace in York,
is buried in the excavations, then rescued.23

In gratitude for their healing the pilgrims bring
wire, coins, and candles, often the latter in coils, their wicks
the measure of the bodies of the recovered patients.

Most
of the pilgrim miracles in these windows concern
Anglo-Saxons (more rarely Anglo-Normans and Britons),
excepting the German Matilda of Cologne. But Thomas Becket
was also revered amongst the French and Scandinavians,
generally along the Norman axis (Normandy, England, Ireland,
Sicily and Jerusalem). Largely due to this axis there is
also an Italian presence. Thomas Becket is shown shortly
after his martyrdom in the Norman/Byzantine mosaics at
Monreale, between 1174 and 1182, Henry II’s daughter having
married William of Sicily in 1177.24The Bishop of Evreux knew of a rich Muslim
merchant of Palermo who converted to Christianity because of
the stories of St Thomas Becket’s miracles.25

Thomas Becket appears in a twelfth-century fresco
at Spoleto, and in a thirteenth-century one at Subiaco.
Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome claimed that Becket had studied in
Rome and venerated there a picture of the Virgin they showed to
pilgrims as well as relics of the saint’s body. John Capgrave
wrote these into his manuscript in 1450, then erased them,
realizing the claims were likely false.26 A ‘foreigner’ was cured
at Thomas Becket’s shrine in 1394 and this miracle was
reported to King Richard II. In 1400, Lorenzo Contarini,
Captain of the Venetian galleys, was permitted by the
Venetian Senate, to visit Canterbury when they were docked
at Sandgate, provided he returned within the day.27We have noted the admiration of the early
sixteenth-century Venetian diplomat at the sumptuousness of
the saint’s shrine.

In the end, another King Henry, Henry VIII,
though he himself had walked barefoot to the shrine of
Walsingham, would destroy Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury,
and execute St Thomas More, the State winning over the
vanquished Church, now become the rigorously politically
controlled and licensed Anglican Church of England. The relics
were destroyed, all pilgrimages forbidden, Thomas Becket’s name
obliterated from books, and the miracles ceased.

In England yew trees were necessary for making
long bows but are toxic to cattle, so they were grown
exclusively in walled churchyards and along the pilgrim roads.
Great yew trees still mark the roads to Canterbury.

We still read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
as a distant mirror. And in the past century an American, T.S.
Eliot, wrote in England the Anglican play, Murder in the
Cathedral, which has been performed in the presence of the
Pope; the stage set in the Vatican replicating the magnificence
of the Canterbury stained glass.

Early in 1848 Virchow, aged
twenty-seven, was sent by the Prussian government to investigate
an outbreak of hunger typhus epidemic prevalent in the weavers
of Upper Silesia. With the paediatrician and bureaucrat
(Geheimer Ober-Medicinalrath) Stephan Friedrich Barez
(1790-1856), Virchow visited the afflicted region for almost
three weeks and came face to face with the backward and
destitute Polish minority, who were struggling precariously to
survive. According to his own testimony, the impact of that
encounter left an indelible mark on his already liberal social
and political beliefs. Instead of merely returning with a new
set of the usual humanitarian, hygienic phrases and medical
guidelines for the Prussian government, Virchow recommended
political freedom, and sweeping educational and economic reforms
for the people of Upper Silesia. Virchow quickly appreciated that the
epidemic was largely due to the dreadful living conditions. His
report and its severe indictment of the government for allowing
this type of misery to occur and his emphasis on social
injustices and poor hygienic regulations that were currently
operative made him very unpopular with the government. The
report was in part politically motivated; it stated inter
alia “the proletariat is the result, principally, of the
introduction and improvement of machinery” . . . “shall the
triumph of human genius lead to nothing more than to make the
human race miserable?”. The government was annoyed, but it
had to deal with the revolution of 1848 in Berlin. Eight days
after his return from Silesia Virchow helped construct some of
the barricades in Berlin during the uprising and participated in
a movement by doctors to appoint a minister for health and
secure greater rights. Virchow recommended the establishment of
a Reichsministerium für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege and the
abolishment of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut. ‘The province was home to several
million peasants living in abject squalor. I reported, "The
upper Silesian in general does not wash himself at all, but
leaves it to celestial providence to free his body occasionally
by a heavy shower of rain from the crusts of dirt accumulated on
it. Vermin of all kinds, especially lice, are permanent guests
on his body’. The people subsisted on potatoes and vodka, with
rare milk or sauerkraut, and were kept impoverished by absentee
landlordism. Education in Upper Silesia was nonexistent because
the people spoke only Polish while the teachers sent by the
government spoke only German. Malaria and dysentery were
endemic, and I also described what you call "kwashiorkor". The
potato harvest had just failed, and it was during the famine
that typhus appeared. In Upper Silesia and elsewhere,
epidemic disease reflected social problems. Typhus appeared when
people were crowded or hungry. The cause of typhus was . . .
misgovernment of the region by the stupid reactionary
politicians in Berlin. I commented, "The government has done
nothing for Upper Silesia"’. My only treatment plan was full and
unlimited democracy for the region. This would include admission
of Polish as the official language, separation of church and
state, shifting of taxes from the poor to the rich, improvement
of agriculture, building of roads, forming of farming
cooperatives, reopening of homes for orphans, and local
administration of relief funds. My politics were those of
prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation. The
Berlin government fired me.’

[22] Madeline Harrison Caviness, “A Lost Cycle of
Canterbury Paintings of 1220”, Antiquaries Annual 54
(1974), 69: "The Trinity Chapel of Christ church is the earliest
preserved example of a . . . kind of shrine house . . .
typically Gothic in conception, in which the decoration is
turned to the inside so that the interior itself assumes the
character of a richly enamelled shrine"; The Windows of
Christ Church Cathedral Canterbury, Corpus Vitrearum Medii
Aevi, Great Britain, 2 (London, Oxford University Press, 1981),
pp. 159-160.

Thanne longen folk to goon on
pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge
strondes, To ferne alwes, kowthe in sondry
londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they
wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke That hem hath holpen whan that they
were seeke.1